Lend-Lease - World War II: Discussion

Thanks. Not the time I had considered. Churchill was a pretty nasty person most of his life.

I am interested too. But I would not be surprised. During WWII the British were hijacking lend-lease shipments intended
for the USSR. One grotesque case is a consignment of Aerocobras which the British claimed would be put to better use
by themselves. Yeah, sure.

The Soviets were used to not getting what they asked for... they asked for B-17s because their four engined bombers were designed and built in the early 1930s and were largely obsolete, and they got Boston twin engined bombers they already had plenty of in production (Pe-2 and Tu-2). Asked for proximity fuses to make their AA guns more effective but were refused... Asked for D-Day, but had to wait until the result of the war was decided and the Germans were in full retreat on the Eastern front before their western allies realised if they didn't do it in 44 they would find the Soviets arriving on the English Channel in 45...

Most of the equipment provided by Lend lease was second rate by western standards, which made it pretty ordinary... the only thing of real value sent was the trucks and transporters... which really didn't have a significant impact till Bagration, though it did mean they could concentrate on making tanks instead of trucks themselves... hardly the sort of support you would expect from the worlds superpower though...

U forgot to mention the P-39 Airacobras/P-63 Kingcobras, B-25 Mitchells & C-47s:
Five of the 10 highest scoring Soviets aces logged the majority of their kills in P-39s. Grigoriy Rechkalov scored 44 victories in Airacobras. Pokryshkin scored 47 of his 59 victories in P-39s, making him the highest scoring P-39 fighter pilot of any nation, and the highest scoring Allied fighter pilot using an American fighter. This does not include his 6 shared victories, at least some of which were achieved with the P-39.
The United States did not supply M80 armor-piercing rounds for the autocannons of Soviet P-39s—instead, the Soviets received 1,232,991 M54 high-explosive rounds, which they used primarily for air-to-air combat and against soft ground targets. The VVS did not use the P-39 for tank-busting duties.
A total of 4,719 P-39s were sent to the Soviet Union, accounting for more than one-third of all U.S. and UK-supplied fighter aircraft in the VVS, and nearly half of all P-39 production.

So what?

By the time they got those planes they were generally obsolete in the west and largely unwanted... they were even derated for the Soviets because the Americans refused to supply turbosuperchargers for the Aircobras, which made them useless at high altitude, though not really much of a problem because combat in the eastern front did not occur at high altitude anyway, but unless you are trying to tell us that these pilots were shit and it was only the super American aircraft that made them any good at air to air combat what difference does that make?

Perhaps if they flew only Soviet planes they would have gotten even higher tallies...

The western pattern of lots of small calibre machine guns in the wings suited new pilots, the Soviet and also German preferred cannon mounted in and around the engine which tended to suit more experienced pilots.

The Soviets got these Cobras because they were failures in western environments and were not well likely by their pilots who preferred HMGs rather than cannon.

The Soviets and the Germans liked cannon especially late in the war for their hitting power.

The U.S. supplied 862 B-25s (B, D, G, and J types) to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease during World War II via the Alaska–Siberia ALSIB ferry route. ..In general, the B-25 was operated as a ground-support and tactical daylight bomber (as similar Douglas A-20 Havocs were used). It saw action in fights from Stalingrad (with B/D models) to the German surrender during May 1945 (with G/J types).

They asked for B-17s and were refused. They ended up using what they got instead but that is hardly a reason to be grateful... the Soviets knew what they wanted and the Americans refused and gave them what they had spare instead... what a shit ally.

707 Douglas C-47 Skytrains were supplied through lend-lease from the US.

They already had them in licence production as the Li-2 and had been producing their own models since 1936...

Seems like a rough deal... we will give you stuff that you have to pay for to kill lots of Germans for us so we don't lose men fighting in a war we are going to claim to have won single handedly later on...

Garry

Can you move this stuff to somewhere else, maybe the Lease Lend WW11 thread, as it has nothing to do with this thread?

Yes.

Still, all those supplied fighters, bombers, & transport planes, etc. helped a lot in stopping the Wehrmacht from taking more territory; & after the Red Army started to advance.

Not really.

Most of the supplied equipment didn't really arrive in useful numbers till after 42... the real critical time was december 41 when German forces were on the outskirts of Moscow and very little foreign material had arrived by then.

You can't just send a brand new aircraft totally alien to anything they had ever used before... put fuel in it and fly up and stop the Germans with it... this isn't an Iron Eagle movie...

Downplayed by the Soviet Union, the program was of vital importance to the USSR’s war effort, as even Marshal Zhukov later admitted. "Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.

And at the time a lot of senior western military men also mentioned without the Soviet war effort the west could not have won.

Quite frankly I find western claims to have won the war by supplying their left over crap in dribs and drabs to what they called at the time their ally but now try to equate with Nazi Germany disgusting. There are British books being published now that ask whether they should have helped Stalin at all... was the cost worth it?

Fuck the western allies.

"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."..

But it was winter that killed all the Germans... not the Soviets... the Germans lost more soldiers to the cold than to Soviet bullets so Lend Lease was meaningless.

During the bitter fighting of the winter of 1941–1942, British aid made a crucial difference.

A second front would have made rather more difference but it never happened because British blood is sacred and Soviet blood was currency.

Under the Lend-Lease act large numbers of American aircraft were assigned to Russia. A total of 14,833 US aircraft of all types were sent to Russia between 1942 and 1944.
Russian aircraft production 1942-1944 was 42,427 fighters and 11,797 bombers (additional 30,506 ground attack planes), which results that approximately 20 per cent of the fighters and 30 per cent of the bombers of the Red Air Force were American-built and approx. 10 per cent of the fighters were British-built.

Except of course during that period of 42-44 the Soviet built planes were good planes and the American supplied aircraft were ordinary to poor.

Five of the 10 highest scoring Soviets aces logged the majority of their kills in P-39s. Grigoriy Rechkalov scored 44 victories in Airacobras. Pokryshkin scored 47 of his 59 victories in P-39s, making him the highest scoring P-39 fighter pilot of any nation, and the highest scoring Allied fighter pilot using an American fighter. This does not include his 6 shared victories, at least some of which were achieved with the P-39.

Because they did more fighting than the US did... we already established the Soviets fought the German Army and Air Force and killed German soldiers and airmen while the British and Americans bombed German women and children and elderly and fought the German Air Force.

Warships also helped:

Ahhh for fucks sake... read the damn title... how the fuck did 150 warships handed over to the Soviet Union for the invasion of Japan actually help anyone at all... when did this invasion take place? When were they even used?

Lend lease was a tiny price to pay to keep the Soviets fighting the Germans.

If Stalin had failed then a Germany with access to Russian oil fields and mining resources and manpower that could be used... even if they only took Ukraine and Belarus for resources and manpower would have made Britain a dead duck and the US would have no way of responding to German hegemony in Europe.

The usual...pumping out numbers and links without even reading or looking at what they actually mean...

For example, in the beginning of 1942, Western tanks fully replenished Soviet losses, and exceeded them by three times.

Really? At the start of the war the Soviets had more tanks than the rest of the world combined... most of which were not so useful T-26 type light tanks, most of which were captured or destroyed in the first 6 months of the war, but you are telling me that western tanks replaced Soviet losses by a factor of 3 times... so the west provided 30,000 tanks... is that what you are saying?

not relevant: w/o those supplied planes, the Germans would have lost less planes, armor & troops, causing more Soviet losses/casualties.

No. If the west didn't supply the equipment for teh Soviets to fight the Germans with the west like the UK and US would have to actually fight the Germans themselves so instead of 750,000 dead for the UK and 225,000 dead for the US their dead would be in the millions just like the other countries who had no choice but to fight the Germans.

I also heard from war veterans that huge quantities of American canned ham sustained them through the war.

Watch the TV show MASH... they continued to supply them in Korea too... they were nicknamed the Second Front...

I am sure instead of being sent tinned meat that they sent some soldiers to help them fight the war instead.

Are the Lease Lend statistics based on the figures invoiced to Russia ex US ports or actual arrivals in Russia?

If the former, they do not take into account the vast quantity that ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic/Norwegian/Barents Seas. During the crucial periods up to the end of 1943/early 1944 significant numbers of ships were sunk, especially off the Norwegian coast.

I know about the very large numbers of aircraft deliveries flying west from Alaska but were there equivalent convoys carrying the heavy stuff going across the Pacific/Arctic Seas to Russia?

Of course LL did help, but to attribute to it the Soviet success against the Nazis is pure nonsense.

The way the Germans treated the Soviets assured that there was no room for surrender and there was never much chance the Germans could manage to kill them all... much the same way Napoleon failed too.

If anything LL provided the logistical mobility to make Bagration a success, but if they didn't have LL and Bagration failed then all those forces tied up and destroyed in that enormous and very successful operation would have been freed to face down and stop D Day from succeeding.

Without LL D Day likely would have failed and the war would probably have taken till 1947 or 48 to slowly grind to a finish with much shorter hops by the Red Army forward pushing the Germans back much slower.

The failure of D Day would have a very serious effect on US and UK forces depending on how it finished with a Dunkirk or a massacre... it would probably be too far for a Dunkirk rescue to take place so likely a massacre and huge boost to the German slave labour work force...

If extra tanks weren't needed, why press into service captured German tanks?

German tanks had good communications and weapons and were combat ready... western tanks had serious faults and were totally different from Soviet tanks in terms of maintenance and operations... even the small arms are different with different calibres of ammo required to make them useful.

Axis tanks and other AFVs were also re-marked and sometimes re-armed with Soviet weapons. One such example is the SU-76i assault gun based on captured Panzer III. Evidence also exists of German Panzer I-based command vehicles re-armed with Soviet 20mm ShVAK cannons. Usually, however, the vehicles were neither modified nor re-marked.

Exceptions and one offs are hardly relevant...

There weren't just German forces invading Russia, there were the armed forces of several eastern european "allies"... whose arms industries couldn't produce anything useful...

that still doesn't mean that those supplied planes, etc. were useless & didn't affect much of anything on the Eastern Front. The help received in arms/ammo., vehicles, materials, food, was substantial. It also saved Ms of man-hours of labour needed to produce & deliver them.

Yeah... the American superbowl winners always thank the makers of jockstraps for their victories every year... because they couldn't have done it without them right?

The fact is that most of the kit they supplied the Soviets was already obsolete by their own terms let alone Soviet terms... pretending it helped win the war is like Japan saying the money it supplied won Desert Storm in 1991 and the US couldn't have done it without their money... technically true but rather offensive to suggest supplying money or resources equates to actually fighting the Iraqi armed forces in the field...

The Red Army was learning to fight & made very costly mistakes until 1943, but they had enough men & women in the FE, GULAG & NKVD to send to the front, if need be- the US would be stupid to send large # of its troops there, esp. after all the casualties & losses in the Pacific.

The British and French and all of Europe also didn't know how to fight properly and were cleaned up in a few weeks... US soldiers would have done no better... Sherman tanks were developed after the T-34 which in most ways was a far superior design, and of the aircraft provided, none were superior to Yak-1, Yak-3, La-5FN, etc etc...

If Germany took Moscow &/ London, the war would continue against it from the rest of the USSR, N. America & N. África. Pe-8s, B-17/29s would bomb the Nazi occupied British Isles & Europe until landings would be attempted. Ms of Indians, Africans & Latin Americans would be drafted to help doing it.

If Germany invaded the UK and took London I doubt the British would continue to fight... like the French... the Soviets weren't given much of a choice... fight or be exterminated...

I suspect those millions of Indians and Africans and latin americans would tell mother britain to fuck off... those Indians would likely be more interested in protecting their own country from the Japanese than helping mother... mother was a bitch to india...

The goal was to wait while Germany & USSR destroyed or at least weakened each other before landing in Europe to take the spoils. This Anglo Saxon strategy failed as the USSR ended up taking all of E. Europe

The goal was to bleed the Soviets and the Germans and then swoop in at the end and take all the glory... trickle feed the Soviets with enough to just keep them going... to keep them from signing a peace treaty with Germany... cynical and nasty... compounded by the aftermath in which the Soviets get equal blame for the occupation of eastern europe for the period of the cold war... ignoring the fact that agreements with Britain and France and the US at Yalta agreed to said occupation and enshrined it on paper... Europe was divided up amongst the allies in the 1940s after the defeat of Germany in the same way that the Middle East was divided up between Britain and France in the 1920s after the defeat of Germany...

But you want the Soviets to fall at your feet and thank you for the dribs and drabs you eventually sent to help... right...

Perhaps if the west had been more genuine and honest allies during the war the Cold War might never need to have happened.

also, Prior to World War II Škoda produced LT-35 tanks, which are better known under their German designation Panzer 35(t). These tanks were originally produced for the Czechoslovak army and were used extensively by the Wehrmacht in the Polish campaign, the Battle of France, and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In July 1944 Škoda started production of the Jagdpanzer 38(t).

Yeah, they were the few vehicles anti tank rifles were still effective against... how exactly did that help the German war effort?

even if obsolete, they were adopted & used with success, aiding in the war effort.

That says more about the Soviets than what they were supplied with...

Likewise, Mongolia supplied them tons of meat & sheep skins needed for winter clothing w/o which troops would freeze to death in 1941-42 even before firing a shot.
..along with Soviet Siberia, the Far East, and Central Asia, Mongolia became the rearguard of the war. A movement to collect aid for the front spread through the country and everything available, such as cattle and meat, leather and raw materials, clothes, cash, gold, and valuables, was collected.

Mongolia did that because they were actually an ally of the Soviet Union... it was the least they could do after the Russians helped them fight off a Japanese attack in the late 1930s... have you not heard of the battle of Khalkhin Gol on the border of Manchuria and Mongolia?

There were times when sheepskin determined the outcome of the war.

Of course... western experts talk all the time about the reason Germany lost two world wars... because of their shortage of sheepskins... obviously...

With Mongolia as an ally, Stalin was supplied with this product.

What a coincidence... because New Zealand supplied Britain with wool and meat throughout the war so I guess Britain needs to kiss our feet and thank us for surviving WWII... I mean without wool for making uniforms they would be speaking German now right?

The US would pressure more for Mexicans, Brazilians, & many others to join them against Germany. As was explained in the "Why We Fight" WWII documentary, the Americas r poor in raw materials & has less population, while Eurasia is rich & has a lot more population:

The US is currently putting pressure on Venezuela to accept some unknown putz as their unelected president... I don't think they will get their way... then or now...

If the situation in Europe got worse... say Stalin overthrown and the Soviet Union fully joining the Nazi effort (instead of just the Baltic countries doing that) and all of a sudden the Germans had 10-15 million new battle hardened soldiers with a war production industry well outside the range of any western country and brand new military equipment like La-5FN fighters and La-7 and La-9s, not to mention Yak-3s and Yak-7s and Yak-9s, and plenty of T-34s and IS-3s and Il-10s... I am sure the volunteers from the rest of the world will be lining up with the US for that sort of fight...

the larger the attacking force, harder for the defenders to stay alive & stop it.

Not if you can destroy the vehicle in question with anything in your anti armour arsenal from rifles and grenades upwards.

Any anti armour unit of Soviet forces would be equipped to take out these vehicles... even the 45mm guns they wheeled around for the whole war initially for use against such vehicles but later because their HE shell was a useful multi purpose weapon... much like 50 cal anti material rifles are considered today...

& it was better than nothing. An obsolete tank or plane can disable more modern enemy tanks that would be captured, fixed/modified, & used against the enemy, thus aiding the war effort.

The Soviets found that inadequate vehicles generally led directly to the deaths of trained crews that were hard to replace... the enormous fleet of obsolete biplanes and Polikarpov mono planes were thankfully destroyed on the ground so pilots lives were spared... the crews of T-26 light tanks were not so lucky...

that's where Zhukov 1st proved himself as capable commander.

Indeed... without any lend lease support at all...

lack of winter clothing & foodstuffs was 1 of the reasons- many of their troops froze to death, just like the French in the War of 1812 & Soviet troops in the 1938 Winter War with Finland.

But they didn't have the winter clothing and oils for machinery and arms and foods to operate in very low temperatures because they were arrogant who thought the war would be over in a couple of weeks and they wouldn't need them. By the time they needed them the logistics line stretched from the warehouses in Germany where the winter gear was stored all the way to the gates of Moscow and in the requests for stuff ammo and fuel had to take higher priority to heavy coats and woolly underwear.

The Mongols were well equipped for cold weather ops; all their major campaigns, incl. the invasions of Rus & E. Europe, were conducted in winter.

Winter happens every year... everyone knows that... the Germans thought they would be home for Christmas so taking winter gear would reduce the amount of ammo or fuel they could carry with them.

Honestly a lot of the cold weather deaths of the German soldiers was because of stupid mistakes of people not used to very cold climates who have not been taught how to behave in frigid climates.

A local will have a flap on his pants he can open to take a shit... a German soldier would make fun of the silly local and lose his dick and testicles to frostbite because he pulled his pants right down and exposed way too much flesh to extreme low temperatures while having a crap...

don't compare winter temperatures of Gr. Britain & W. USSR in general & 1941/42 in particular. For the Red Army the warm clothing was more crucial.

But without New Zealand the British would have had to fight the battle of brittain naked... that would have effected their performance... and you don't need minus 30 or colder temperatures to appreciate a good warm coat in winter...

times have changed!

Not really... neutral countries were not lining up to join the fight if they could help it and if things had gone bad in Europe for the western allies they would not have been in much of a position to bully anyone else into joining the fun... remember it is not just a case of convincing another country to join... most of the time the US would also have to provide all the hardware they would fight with as well as the stuff they were using themselves.

Even if many Soviet planes were better than German, if they weren't produced in large #s or at all, like the outstanding Tu-2, it's a moot point:

The Soviets outproduced the Germans by a wide margin, but what was more important... they had fuel supplies to keep their planes operating... which by 1945 the Germans really didn't. A few German Aces leading formations of Soviet pilots against the hated British... I could see that happening...

well, they weren't discarded but used for while; even if melted down to make T-34s or other armor, those tanks were useful & helped to make the Blitzkrieg to slow down. They could also be used as self-propelled artillery &/dug in for defence or their cannons & machine guns could be removed & used by artillerists & by infantry machine gunners.

If they weren't leading the charge and destroying all the Germans then they didn't win the fucking war...

it was a short border war, not a major war.

It was the Border War that made them realise Siberia and its oil and wood and mineral and material resources were out of reach... so instead of invading Russia (after 1905 they thought they could do what they like like they had been doing in China for the previous decade)... they took on the British and French and Americans by heading south to the Pacific and Asia... not important at all really...

The supply lines in & around the USSR were a lot longer; the Western & Mongolian supplies helped a lot.

By the time they were set up and working and actually delivering useful stuff the difficult phase was over and the Germans had been pushed back from Moscow.

You do understand that the closest the Germans got to Moscow was in December 1941 and they were pushed back by troops transferred from the far east... ie nothing to do with Lend Lease... all the stuff about the first defeat at Stalingrad and first defeat in non winter conditions at Kursk hide the fact that the first thing to really stop the German Army and Air Force... other than the English Channel was the Soviets in December 1941... and they did it without lend lease.

British supplied tanks saved Moscow.

What British supplied tanks?

which proves my point about the importance non-lethal aid!

I read a lot of military books written by British military experts... never once saw any recognition of New Zealand for supplying food and material... so it clearly didn't happen.

during the war, Ms of Mexicans replaced Americans in factories & at farms/ranches, & Ms more of them & others could be enlisted/hired by US &/ their governments for some future US arrangedincentives/ perks.

That is not the same thing... besides in Russia it was women and children and old men that worked in factories and on farms and did that work...

Africa, Greenland & Antarctica could be colonized to extract needed resources.

What resources... the costs of extraction would exceed any value they might get from them.

If Germany could produce synthetic oil from coal, so could the US. But all that was harder to do then to supply allies which would bring $Bs to the MIC & bankers+stop & help defeat the Nazis.

With the Soviets on their side Germany would not only have enormous reserves of oil and gas... as would Japan who could now adopt Soviet fighter planes and tanks, but they could mount an invasion of the Middle East and deny the oil there to the Americans... German air power and submarines could hunt down and obliterate the Royal Navy and then with the help of Soviet fighters take out the Royal Air Force too...

Then the invasion of the UK would begin.

that took time to achieve; before that started to happen, LL bought this extra time, saved lives, killed more enemy, & helped shorten the 2nd half of the war: Under Lend-Lease, 4,102 M4A2 medium tanks were sent to the Soviet Union.

NO it didn't... German production didn't get on to a war footing until very late in the war, while Soviet production was disrupted for a short period but by 42 was producing 24/7 with round the clock shifts...

The first 76mm-armed M4A2 diesel-fuel Shermans started to arrive in Soviet Union in the late summer of 1944. By 1945, some Red Army armoured units were standardized to depend primarily on them and not on their ubiquitous T-34. Such units include the 1st Guards Mechanized Corps, the 3rd Guards Mechanized Corps and the 9th Guards Mechanized Corps, amongst others

I love the propaganda... by late summer of 1944 the war had been decided and Germany knew it was a gonner... and duh... when you get a non standard vehicle you don't mix it in with your existing types because it probably wont keep up and will slow down the entire force and the engines and tracks and guns are all different which means supporting a mixed unit of different tanks means different gun ammo different parts and even different tools... it is pretty obvious if someone gives you a whole lot of vehicles you keep them together in their own units together so you can support the one type rather than having to support multiple different types of non standard 76mm guns.

The Sherman was largely held in good regard and viewed positively by many Soviet tank-crews which operated it before, with compliments mainly given to its reliability, ease of maintenance, generally good firepower (referring especially to the 76mm-gun version) and decent armour protection, as well as an auxiliary-power unit (APU) to keep the tank's batteries charged without having to run the main engine for the same purpose as the Soviets' own T-34 tank required.

By 44/45 the T-34s were very reliable and had compressed air start that will work in temperatures where a fully charged battery will go flat in 10 minutes and don't need a fucking battery... and they had a far superior 85mm gun with decent ammo... the only good thing about the 76mm gun was its APFSDS rounds which they did not supply to the Soviets... plus you know they called the first models Emcha... M for Em, and Cha for the numeral 4 with an open top that looked like a Russian cyrillic character that also means tire... because the original ones had petrol engines and burned like tires...

But if you want to quote shit about the M4 why not get down to the nitty gritty:

"The ORSs attached to the Armoured Fighting Vehicle School at Lulworth…had established that the Sherman 75 was unlikely to destroy any German armor at ranges beyond 500 yards, and that even at shorter ranges no penetration of the frontal armour of anything except a Mark IV was likely. They had also established that the 17-pounder's effective range was limited to about 1,000 yards" (discusses research conducted on hulls of destroyed Shermans and German tanks). "Most of the damage (to Shermans), 77 percent, was done by 75mm guns, just 18 percent by 88s. Almost every shot that hit a Sherman penetrated the armour, and 73 percent caught fire…the contrast to German tanks was striking…only 38 percent of the hits from Sherman 75s or 6-pound antitank guns penetrated German armour, and both the Panther and Tiger often survived one or two penetrations…the sloping front armour of the enemy's Panthers and self-propelled guns survived 75 percent of all direct hits" quoted from Copp, Fields of Fire: the Canadians in Normandy (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 128-129

Regarding the performance of the Sherman... how about this:

The Combat performance section strangely focuses only on the late "Firefly" variant most successful against larger German Panzers, yet the Sherman Firefly article itself points out that these arrived only in 1944, and that only 2100-2200 were produced. This article is about lend-lease Sherman tanks in general, and so should reflect the entire range of success/performance for all models over the entire war. Most interviews I have seen with actual Sherman crews (granted, mostly British, Canadian, and ANZAC troops) dwell extensively on the vast inferiority of the design, at least on European battlefields against heavier German tanks with their 88mm guns and AP shells. (The Germans are said to have called the Shermans "Tommy cookers".) They talk about their enormous relief when the British 17-pounder gun was finally incorporated, making the tank a viable weapon against Tigers. They also make mention of some American resistance to this beneficial modification on the grounds that it was not an American-made gun. I see no reason why this information should not be fully presented here.

The 76mm gun fitted to Lend Lease Shermans for the the Soviets was no where near as good as the 17 pounder... which could be compared with the 85mm gun on the T-34/85. The American 76mm gun was not comparable.

The 76mm US gun actually had less HE filler than the 75mm Soviet gun... the Soviet 85mm had even more HE filler because three quarters of the ammo in a tank is HE... of the targets on the battlefield German heavy tanks might be less than 1% of those...